A thousand people crushed into a fluorescent yellow tent in the RDS Simmonscourt Grounds on Sunday night for Cirque Plume, who staged the opening show of the Dublin Theatre Festival. But the opening act - Sile de Valera, Minister for the Arts - had been forced to cancel due to illness.
However, Michael Grant, assistant secretary at the Minister's Department, delivered her speech, so we must attribute to her the comment that the Irish theatre tradition is "arguably the most rich and varied in the world". Unless you count Russia, I suppose, or France, or Italy, or Poland, or Romania, or India, or Spain, or the whole shebang of South America, or The Rest Of The World. The festival is one of the few chances we get to see theatre from The Rest Of The World, which some say is a mighty big country, and if de Valera's assertion still stands at the end of the next two weeks, it will have been a dismal festival.
Admittedly this writer feels in no position to write about Irish theatre, having told the world at large in a news piece yesterday that the Abbey was due to stage a new play by Tom MacIntyre - when of course the new play is by Tom Kilroy (the disease is called "festival frenzy").
On to some idle gossip. Those of you who saw Dominic West playing in Michael West's A Play On Two Chairs in the Fringe last week little guessed, perhaps, that he would have been looming large on a screen near you had it not been for the death of the Princess of Wales. I'm sure he's glad the film wasn't out when she died, as he played the newshound in Diana And The Pa- parazzo. This English-born actor, whose roots are all Irish - his sister lives in Dublin - has played in Richard III and Surviving Picasso, among other films, and has a cameo role in the Spice Girls' movie - he asked his agent for it because he wanted to meet them. But the pleasure may well have been mutual because he has been officially designated one of the world's 100 sexiest men by Cosmopolitan magazine. Which makes this a morality tale: get out to some of those 100 Fringe shows, or miss many sights which will gladden your eyes.
